The digital revolution has come to television. With the advent of digitally-encoded television, simple analog television (TV) receivers have been superseded by digital receivers capable of receiving and demodulating electrical signals, then extracting and decoding the compressed video and audio data streams mandated by the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) encoding standards that form the basis for the Advanced Television Systems Committee digital television broadcast standard in the United States. These integrated receiver/decoder (IRD) devices contain analog and digital processing circuitry that is controlled by a central processing unit (CPU). IRDs also contain static and dynamic memory stores, interfaces, and a full complement of features that serve to enable a broad range of computational processing, including the execution of resident or downloaded applications software. When executing such applications, the IRD can generate graphics content that is overlaid onto the video content for display on an external television screen. Newer televisions incorporate the functions of the IRD, making them useful computation platforms capable of executing downloaded applications. More sophisticated IRDs may incorporate disc drive storage subsystems. These personal video recorders (PVRs) are capable of storing and playing back audio/video content.
A parallel body of work has aimed at developing standardized software execution environments that can enable the widespread deployment of interactive applications within the television broadcast infrastructure. This work has been complicated in the past by the wide variety of hardware and software deployed in IRDs, particularly set-top boxes (STBs) developed for the decoding and presentation of signals in cable TV distribution systems. The effort to develop a common Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) for consumer electronic devices led to the development of a Java-based standard for interactivity in the cable television realm, the Open Cable Application Platform (OCAP) now called tru2way. More recently, a separate standardization effort has produced the Enhanced Television Binary Interchange Format (ETV-BIF) standard for less-capable cable platforms.
The production and distribution of television content has historically been supported through the incorporation of advertising content into the broadcast stream. Advertisers pay for the right to broadcast advertising content at selected times in pairing with selected broadcast content, the cost to the advertiser reflecting the anticipated or potential audience that may view the advertisement. The selection of available time slots, or ‘avails’, by an advertiser is based in part of the expected target audience for the video content being shown on the given channel or service. An advertiser of products of particular interest to young people may prefer avails within content expected to interest those same young people.
Advertisers and broadcasters have developed a number of metrics or categories that can be used to describe a person or group of people who might consume a product or view a broadcast. Each audience qualifier (AQ) defines a qualitative or quantitative feature of a consumer, and divides the universe of consumers into a few categories. For example, ‘gender’ is an audience qualifier with two values, ‘male’ and ‘female’. Another quantitative qualifier is ‘age’, which may be categorized into a series of ranges, for example ‘under 12’, ‘12 to 17’, ‘18 to 34’, ‘35 to 59’, ‘60 and older’. A valid and useful audience qualifier is one for which two or more categories can be defined. Table 1 illustrates these audience qualifiers and associated categories:
TABLE 1Audience Qualifiers and Associated CategoriesAudience Qualifier (AQ)GenderAgeCategories within AQMaleUnder 12Female12 to 1718 to 3435 to 5960 and older
Content creators, content distributers, and advertisers use AQs to characterize content and to quantify viewership. The Nielsen ratings company associates television viewership patterns with the AQs of each measured viewer or home. An advertiser will preferably run ads that appeal to children during Saturday morning cartoons, and ads that appeal to sports fans during Sunday afternoon football games.
When television content is distributed through terrestrial broadcast, networks distribute a common content stream to all viewers, and rely on aggregate statistics to predict the characteristics of the viewing audience for given video content.
What is required is a system that enables the creation and distribution of multiple versions of an application based on audience qualifiers.